


Home Sweet Home

by xzombiexkittenx



Series: In the Kingdom of the Blind [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003)
Genre: Drug Abuse, Dubious Consent, M/M, On the Run, Rough Sex, Stockholm Syndrome, craptastic medical procedures, really bad language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:15:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/840936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xzombiexkittenx/pseuds/xzombiexkittenx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's none so blind as those who will not see. El, Lorenzo, Fideo, and their new captive/partner Sands are on the road and on the run from the CIA.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home Sweet Home

**Author's Note:**

> This is a really old fic. I couldn't deal with Lj anymore, so I'm uploading it here by request. Please note the dub-con/non-con warnings. Any dialogue in Spanish is denoted with // instead of quote marks.

They had traveled a lot, too much, when Sands was still kitten-weak and high on morphine. The red Toyota they took was Lorenzo’s new car, for all that he never drove it. It was El behind the wheel, Lorenzo in the front seat (“Longest legs, amigo, sorry.”) and Fideo in the back seat, Sands curled up next to him, head on his lap. Mostly El just drove, silent and concentrated. Lorenzo put himself in charge of music and spent hours flicking through songs on the CD player. Fideo just sat in the back and drank. Sands wasn’t in any state to do much of anything.

The bullet wounds were healing well, though he was too drugged to know better than to move his arms and legs and the pain would be enough to make him cry out. It was infection and trauma that El worried about, when they stopped at one motel or another. When he changed the bandages, wiped Sands down with a damp cloth to clean off the dust and sweat, and injected him with yet more morphine. The bruising around his eye-sockets had spread, lurid purple-green creeping down to his cheekbones and up past his eyebrows. He whimpered in pain when El so much as laid the gentlest touch there and the swelling was terrible to behold.

They never stayed very long in one place, the cartels had hit men everywhere looking for them and, with Sands in their care, the CIA was never far behind.

Lorenzo had complained about that, long and hard. Why slow themselves down looking after Sands? After all, hadn’t he been the one to drag them into this mess in the first place?

El did agree, to some extent. On the days that Sands fought him, then El agreed with Lorenzo. Sands calling him by names of people El had never met, disorientated and terrified, fighting the needles and the food and water El tried to give him, then yes, it did seem a little bit too much trouble. On the days when Sands threw up from the pain, or the days when he spent hours making a horrible sound, halfway between a moan and a sob and scream, when he got up in the night and tried to wander away, too delirious to know better, then it did seem as if El’s patience would wear too thin to deal with him.

Late at night though, when Fideo snored in one bed and Lorenzo was still out partying, when El checked on Sands, sometimes the man would sigh and smile, soft and fragile, and curl into the touch. Sometimes he would lie still and swallow his food as instructed and fall asleep in El’s arms. 

Sometimes Sands would cry, silent sobbing, shaking his slender frame and El would remember the cocky gringo who sat across the table from him, telling El that he was going to shoot the cook and he would stroke Sands’ back until the sobbing abated.

Fideo told him it was guilt. 

Fideo was right.

It was Sands’ coup money that had bought the car in the first place. The new car, Lorenzo’s new clothing, Fideo’s drinks and El’s beautiful new gun, all came from that money. It wasn’t Sands’, by rights, more like Finders Keepers, but still.

What was more to the point was that El had seen Sands in the plaza, seen him kill three people before sinking to the ground and had left him there. El had assumed Sands was dead. He’d been shot, he hadn’t been moving. It was only when the cellphone in El’s pocket rang that the mariachi knew he had been wrong.

“Are you still standing?” Sands’ voice had been tight with pain and there was a hint of desperation in his tone.

El had smiled, despite himself. “Still.”

Sands had hissed between his teeth like something really hurt and there had been the sounds of movement, of the phone hitting the ground and then a young boy’s voice, Mexican, worried, had begged El to come and help.

He had found them staying with the boy’s mother. Sands wounded, and sick, and fever hot. El had his revenge thanks to this man. True, he had allowed a coup to take place, but in the end, hadn’t everything worked out pretty well for everyone but himself? Would he have come back for El? Doubtful. El wasn’t Sands though. So, because El had seen him and left him for dead, he felt guilty, and because Sands looked like the shadow of the man he had been, El felt sorry for him. He had bundled him up and gone to find Lorenzo and Fideo with barely a second thought.

It was a long time into their pseudo road-trip when Fideo finally pointed out that Sands’ wounds had healed and the only thing keeping him down was the incredible amounts of morphine that El kept giving him.

So El took Fideo at his word and stopped. Cold turkey.

Sands had sweated and shook and cursed until El wondered if it wouldn’t just be better to just keep him drugged forever and a day. When it was all over, when Sands was clean, he was a little more twitchy and a little more nervous than he had been before, (though that could have been a side-effect from being blinded) and it seemed as if El had finally done the right thing at the right time and had it not be too late. 

For his part, Sands, when he was able to sit up and hold a conversation, told El he was a mentally retarded cactus-fuck for not just letting him die. 

El had taken it as the only thanks he was going to get.

*~*~*~* 

The brief was simple. CIA agents Robson and Balrow were on a retrieval mission down in Mexico to find agent Sheldon Sands. He was MIA or, more likely judging by his profile, AWOL and needed to be brought in for debriefing. It looked simple enough on paper until you read the small print.

Sands had been missing since the attempted coup d’etat on the Day of the Dead when his line had been compromised and he didn’t call in with any of the others. Six men had gone in already, intelligence gathering, trying to find out what the hell went down. None of them had come out. The little information that had been sent back was incoherent fragments of what sounded more like folklore than actual witness reports. A dead general, a dead cartel boss, a dead AFN agent, a dead fugitive and as yet uncounted dead civilians. Three mariachi with lethal guitars, a retired FBI agent, and a small dog. A man with no eyes and three arms, who killed three people while the blood was still hot on his face.

None of it made that much sense and none of it sounded like Sands.

Robson and Balrow were taking it carefully though. None of this ‘go into a bar and interview strangers’ because that was a surefire way to be the seventh and eight agents go missing. No, they just waited, and watched and pulled all the sources that hadn’t already been compromised by agents one through six. 

The brief was simple, but nothing in Mexico ever let anything stay that way.

*~*~*~* 

“What color is the wall paper?” 

El rolled over in his bed to stare over towards the window. Sands had been pacing the room, bare feet padding softly, back and forth, back and forth. Now he stood, face turned up to the moonlight. It was a full moon, swollen and bright, and the stars out here, away from the big cities, shone like diamonds scattered in the sky. He wondered why Sands bothered looking out the window when he couldn’t see and there wasn’t any sort of breeze to catch.

“Perdón?”

Sands turned, sunglasses on even though it was just El in the room with him and there was nothing El hadn’t seen. “You heard me ukulele-ass. What color is the wallpaper?”

El didn’t remember Sands’ language being so appalling when they had first met but apparently being blinded had not brought out the softer side in the man. “I don’t know, Sands.” El sighed, wondering why they couldn’t have cut out his tongue instead. “It’s dark, go to bed.”

This, apparently, was the wrong answer. Sands flinched like El had struck him, wrapping his arms about his middle, shoulders hunched as he turned back to stare out the window.

El rolled back over. What difference did wallpaper make to someone like Sands? He needed to know where furniture was, not if the roses outside the window were pink or white. It wasn’t until Sands finally climbed into his own bed that El got to sleep though.

*~*~*~* 

“Is that decaf?”

Robson gave Balrow the finger. “No. It’s not.” He slurped on it defiantly.

Balrow grimaced. “Jesus, you’re going to be up all night and if you keep me up I’ll fucking kill you.” He sat at the table and examined the papers spread across the surface. “This everything?”

“The whole shebang.” Robson frowned, sipped on his coffee and the shook his head. “No, wait.” He stuck his head under the table and came up with a handful of papers that had floated to the floor. He dropped them on top of the others and grinned at Balrow. “That’s everything.”

“Fuck.” Balrow shifted through some of the typed sheets. 

Robson smiled innocently. “Coffee?”

Balrow accepted, grimacing at the taste. “This is cheap shit,” he complained. “Right, main players.” They shuffled through the papers coming up with a number of profile pages. “Barillo, dead.” He moved to the floor and set it down with a decided air, marking the beginnings of a pile. “Tried to start a coup with the help of- hey, pass me Marquez, thanks- who is also dead. Working for them were Doctor Guervera and one Billy Chambers, both dead and boy is the FBI going to be pissed off with that last one.”

Robson held up a profile of Jorge Ramirez. “Retired FBI, we’ve got a match for his gun in Guervera’s body. Crime lab also matched Barillo’s gun to the bullets in Chambers. There’s one of Ramirez’s bullets in Barillo but also two unknowns. The sonuvabitch was harder to kill than it looks. Only question is, who shot him and who shot Marquez?”

“The guitar players?” Balrow sighed. “Christ, this is where it gets so fucking stupid.” He downed a large part of his coffee and choked on the taste and heat. “Leave it for the moment. What about the AFN report?”

“They had even less idea about how she got messed up in the coup than us, but check it out, lab results show that she was related to Barillo, most likely his daughter, a niece at the furthest. That explains all her movements nicely.”

“Fuck, sneaky bitch.” There was admiration in Balrow’s voice.

Robson furrowed his brow, concentrating fiercely. “So Ramirez gets involved because he wants revenge for his partner and…and what? The guy sat in retirement for years without making a peep and then all of a sudden he gets off his ass and makes a move. It doesn’t fit his profile.”

Balrow crossed his legs, staring at the papers on the floor in front of him. “Let’s try this from another angle. Sands knows about the coup. He sends calls from one mobile to two others, meaning he was involving at least two other people. The coup starts and then no one sees hide nor hair of him but there are his bullets in three of Barillo’s men and in the AFN girl.”

“So Sands knew about her. He figures out what she’s up to and stops her. Rather crudely, but then again, it was in the middle of a coup. Only he needs backup, so he gets a retired FBI with a grudge to help him. One of the guys he was calling.”

“Assuming that’s right…Motherfucker, that just leaves us the missing caller, who the hell shot Barillo, the mariachi and this guy with no eyes.”

Robson yawned and got to his feet. “Screw it, I’m going out for a beer and a cheap fuck. You want to come?”

*~*~*~* 

“We’re out of milk.” Sands turned the carton upside-down, shaking it to emphasize his point. A spattering of droplets spattered onto his bare feet but he ignored it in favor of right-ending it and pretending to peer into the mouth, a mock sad expression on his face, pout and all.

“Christ, you’re getting it all over the floor.” Lorenzo snatched the offending carton from him and hit him over the head with it before throwing it in the garbage. “Just for one day, could you not be an ass?”

Sands sneered, lip curled up to expose his top teeth. “Gee, Lori, I don’t know. Maybe if you don’t act like a fuck-monkey for a day I might be able to manage it.”

Lorenzo growled low in his throat and smacked Sands on the arm, a little harder than strictly necessary. Sands retaliated by pulling a 9mm Browning Hi Power out of the waist band of his low-slung jeans. He grabbed Lorenzo by the arm, twisted it behind his back, pushing the taller man face down onto the countertop and rammed the barrel of his gun against Lorenzo’s forehead. In the silence, the sound of the safety being clicked off was overly loud.

“Touch me again and I’ll be scraping your brains off the counter and eating them for breakfast, comprende?” 

“Sands.” El didn’t raise his voice, he didn’t need to. The one word was enough to make Sands let go of Lorenzo and step back, gun pointed safely at the floor. El held out one hand, a pained sigh escaping his lips. “Give me the gun.”

Lorenzo made a small sound of disgust, righting himself and smoothing his shirt. //Keep your psycho on a tighter leash, El.// He shook his head, moving to sit back at the breakfast table, where his cornflakes sat in the last of the milk, slowly going soggy. 

El shifted closer to Sands as Lorenzo deliberately slurped his coffee. Sands faltered, a fleeting expression of panic on his face. He clicked the safety back on and then, stalling for time, he popped the clip out, weighing the two in his hands. El waited patiently, hand outstretched. A long silence drew out. Lorenzo took a bite of his cornflakes and winced at the shock of the sound of the crunch in such a tense silence. All of the tension, incidentally, coming from Sands. 

He was scowling, head down, shoulders hunched up, hair tumbling down to half obscure his face. He had managed to cut his jaw shaving and his shirt, emblemized with ‘I’m only wearing black because all my pink is in the wash’, was badly wrinkled. His boxer shorts, sticking out of the top of his jeans, had marijuana leaves on them. It was a pitiful sight. 

Finally Sands slammed the gun and clip down on the counter. “Get them yourself,” he snapped, close to a shout. “Get them your-goat-fucking-self. I can’t fucking give them to you, cactus brains, if I can’t fucking see where you are.” 

When El lowered his hand and took a single, spur jingling step closer, Sands snatched up the clip and hurled it at El’s head. To El’s credit, he caught it mid-air, but the smack of his fist closing around the projectile did nothing to mollify Sands.

Sands threw the gun as well, this time at the wall. “How do you expect me to find you when I don’t have any god-damned eyes?!” His voice rose in pitch and cracked, hysterical sounding, and then Sands was storming from the room. 

Only, he didn’t quite make it. Too angry to pay the proper attention, Sands misjudged his position in the little kitchenette and clipped the edge of the table as he stormed past, stubbing his toes against the table leg and then stumbling, falling, and smacking his head on the fridge as he went down, hard, onto the floor. Lorenzo, spoon halfway to his mouth, froze there as Sands put his head in his hands and started to laugh. It was not a healthy sound. The mariachi scooped up his breakfast and made a hasty retreat towards the safety of the garden.

//Good luck, my friend,// he mumbled to El as he passed, a worried expression on his face.

El set the clip down on the table and went to crouch next to Sands who was laughing hard enough to shake his slender frame, as if he would shake himself apart.

“Sands, pull yourself together.” He put a hand on Sands’ shoulder and that was enough.

Sands’ laughter stopped as if someone had flipped a switch and he sat, legs sprawled, hands and arms limp at his sides as if he was a rag-doll some careless child had thrown to the floor. His lower lip was trembling. “I don’t have any eyes.” 

He hadn’t said a word when they had first taken his eyes, there had been no time to fall apart then. He hadn’t fallen apart when El tended his wounds and nursed him back to health. Once he was off the morphine he had spent his time re-learning things with a single-minded intensity. How to shave, how to make his own, albeit simple, meals, how to clean a gun and the layout of every single motel they found themselves in. He hadn’t fallen apart when he couldn’t do things right the first time, or when El had to help him with simple tasks. Maybe a nervous breakdown was long overdue.

“I don’t have any eyes.” There was a rising panic in his voice and he grabbed hold of El’s hand, gripping it hard enough to hurt. “I don’t…”

“I know,” El said soothingly and shuffled closer.

Without warning, Sands launched himself at El, knocking El backwards so he was sitting against the breakfast bar and Sands was half lying in his lap, fists clutching at El’s shirt. His sunglasses were a little skewed, slipping down his nose and El could see past them to the now-healed sockets.

They had taken everything, eye-lids, tear ducts, everything, leaving him with nothing but two gaping holes in his face.

It struck El as unfair that Sands couldn’t mourn his loss properly. He couldn’t cry tears, but the ex-agent was sobbing anyway, choking on every breath, still halfway to hysterical laughter.

El pulled Sands a little closer, so he wasn’t lying quite so much on El’s legs, cradling him, Sands’ head resting on his shoulder as he rubbed soothing circles on his back. It took El a moment to realize that Sands was mumbling in between sobs.

“-color, and Sunday morning cartoons, never gonna…” he broke off into another sobbing fit. “Took my eyes, no more books, no eyes, oh god no eyes, not gonna read another book, never gonna see the Mona Lisa…” With each word his voice was edging closer to the breaking point.

Looking back, El wasn’t sure why he did what he did.

He shoved Sands, pushed him backwards so he lay on the kitchen floor and straddled his hips, pinning his hands above his head. Sands stopped talking, mid flow, his body was shaking under El’s thighs, lips slightly parted and his breathing was harsh. El leaned forward and captured those lips in a kiss as harsh as Sands’ breathing. It wasn’t a gentle first kiss, El pressed into it as if he would bruise the back of Sands’ head on the kitchen floor. For sure his teeth were bruising Sands’ lips and he bit down on the soft flesh, the sharp coppery tang of Sands’ blood lubricating the kiss, wetting dry, sun and wind chapped lips.

Sands’ fingers curved into fists above his head and his back bowed, arching up into the space between them. 

El let go of Sands’ wrists in exchange for grabbing the hem of his oversized shirt and yanking it up over his head, tangling it around Sands’ wrists. The torso beneath him was all sharp angles and lines, most of his ribs could be counted and his hipbones jutted out like handles. El leaned over and ran his tongue in a slow line from Sands’ belly-button to his collarbone and Sands made a noise that was a whimper but so different from all the ones he had made when in pain. His back arched even further, hands tightening and relaxing, desperate to touch and El took that opportunity to attach his mouth to Sands’ neck.

“Oh god, El.” Sands squirmed and it was enough to push his pelvis up against El’s. 

The reaction this provoked was almost violent. El rolled up from his knees to a crouch and grabbed Sands by the waistband of his jeans, hauling him to his feet, Sands clutching at his jacket to try and stay balanced. He took a fistful of Sands’ hair, pulling him in for another ferocious kiss and pushing him backwards down onto the table, scattering the cornflakes onto the floor, golden flakes crunching underfoot. Sands had his hands partway out of the tangle of his shirt so El snatched a kitchen knife up from the counter and pinned the shirt to the table.

“Stay put,” he said, wrenching the buttons on Sands’ jeans open. 

Sands tossed his head, trying to slide his sunglasses back into place. The movement only served to dislodge them further and he made a small distressed sound that trailed off into a whimper of arousal when El dragged Sands’ jeans and boxers down over his hips and onto the floor.

Some part of El registered that none of this could be very comfortable for Sands. His lips were kiss-swollen and bruised and the mark on his neck was already darkening to a deep red. The angle of his spine and the edge of the table were making him squirm in discomfort and having his clothing so roughly removed must have hurt, even a little. Judging by Sands’ body though, he was enjoying it immensely. It raised El’s mental eyebrows but then, who was he to judge?

“Please,” Sands gasped as El fumbled for the butter dish, coating his fingers. “My glasses…”

El lifted one of Sands’ legs up, pushing his thigh back to his chest and running one butter-slick finger under his sac to the opening to his body. “You know,” he said, almost conversationally, sliding the finger inside Sands without pause. “You are a clever man.”

Sands could do nothing more than pant desperately for air, making high pitched whining sounds each time he inhaled.

El pressed another finger in, Sands’ body clutching about the digits and relaxing, trying to expel him. He leaned in to pluck the sunglasses off and toss them to the floor. “Your language is foul and you need to stop fighting with Lorenzo, but you are not a stupid man.” As Sands tried to turn his face away, El used his free hand to hold his head in place. He pressed a kiss to the edge of the socket and slid a third finger inside, twisting them a little, stretching Sands.

“Don’t.” Sands struggled then, trying to hide his face but unable to move it so much as an inch either way. He only managed to impale himself further on El’s questing fingers and the pleasure shocks sent sparks up his veins and it seemed as if there was something on the edge of his vision, only he didn’t have vision any more and it was so close to being something that it almost hurt.

“This will not break you, I think.” 

Sands’ lips curled back into a sneer, never mind that he was still panting. “Fuck you.”

Even without sight, he could tell El was smiling, he could hear it. “I was not referring to our current situation, gatito.” Then the fingers were withdrawn and Sands’ sneer was replaced by him desperately biting at his lip to keep silent. “You will survive this.” Hard heat and then El was pushing into Sands, slowly, agonizingly slowly. “You will adapt.”

“Not if you don’t fucking move,” Sands grated out and his voice was dangerously close to a plea.

El obliged by driving into him hard enough to make the table creak and groan under them. Sands dug his fingernails into his palms and his legs came to wind around El’s waist, heels pressing into El’s spine, using it as leverage to move back against El. In El’s opinion it was already too hard for someone in Sands’ physical condition but he would have been hard pressed to ease up when Sands was slick and warm and writhing under him in something not quite pain and not quite pleasure and the broken sounds coming out of his mouth were his pleas for moreharderpleasegodharder.

He leaned in, pressing down on Sands, mouthing the sharp line of his collarbone, along his pulse beating rabbit-fast, up over his cheekbones to nip at the edges of his eyesockets. Sands froze for one long second and then his breathing started up again though El hadn’t noticed him holding it. Sands was panting, each inhalation a whimper, each exhalation labored and he was begging now, incoherent in his demands. El curled his tongue around the rims of the sockets and snapped his hips forward almost brutally. It must have been what Sands was after because he was shaking now and he couldn’t even form words any more, mouth slack, all he could manage was an unholy sound between a moan and a scream. He sobbed out a sound that might have been El’s name and came, without El even touching him at all.

Sands lay under the assault and the over-sensitization was what triggered the shocks in his nerve endings and there was color reflecting the synapse firing and melting from the sensation and he could see it, feel it, taste it. And, oh god, he could see El, a great black velvet shadow in the dark and El’s tongue was in his mouth and he was pushed inside Sands as far as possible, shuddering his release inside him.

They stayed that way for a moment until Sands squirmed half-heartedly. “Cramping,” he mumbled but there was a slight smile on his face that warmed something inside of El that he had thought was long dead.

El pulled out, taking the care he hadn’t shown earlier, unpinning Sands and helping him ease off the table. He wet a cloth in the sink and gently wiped the sticky mess off Sands’ stomach and thighs before helping him back into his clothing. Sands slumped gratefully in the chair, easing out the strains and kinks in his spine. It wasn’t patronizing. They both knew Sands could have done it himself but for whatever reason, El wanted to do it for Sands and Sands seemed content to let him do it. He let El get him a glass of orange juice and agreed to an omelet for breakfast. 

“I meant what I said,” El restarted the conversation over the domestic sounds of him making breakfast. “You are a survivor and you will overcome this.”

Sands shoved his sunglass back on but there was a lazy smirk on his face. “Of course I will fuckwit, and I mean what I say when I say that you’re a jangling beansucker and if you skimp on the cheese I’ll paint your guitar case luminous pink.”

*~*~*~* 

“Christ. My head feels like someone’s put my brain through a fucking meatgrinder,” Robson groused, looking somewhat the worse for wear for his night out.

Balrow looked up from the papers and grinned. It wasn’t a friendly expression. “We got an ID on that butcher’s shop.”

Robson looked blank. “What the fuck?”

“Doctor Guevera. The blood, the torture instruments…we got an ID on all that shit.” Balrow popped the remains of a glazed donut into his mouth and chewed contentedly. “Some of it is old, unidentifiable, but we got tags on Archuleta and Sands. I guess that’s where he was when all the shit went down.”

“So…what? You’re saying…”

Balrow shook his head, rolling his eyes. “I’m saying he got caught and tortured and I think that covers our missing links. Look, he gets the FBI to help out and all that goes according to plan. He tries to get the AFN to help but he gets Barillo’s daughter and she sets him up, gets him caught. He escapes, kills her and the two thugs outside, which would explain the fake arm that was mentioned in the reports. Christ, Sands and his fucking gadgets.”

“How the fuck did you figure all that out?” Robson snatched a doughnut out of the box and set into it with a grateful sigh. “And if that’s so, then where the fuck is he now?”

“I was up at five, not balls deep in a whore,” Balrow said snidely. “Which leaves the rumors and legends of the mariachi. I found out that, according to rumor, the main guy-” he checked his notes briefly- “El, he had a beef with Marquez for killing his wife. So if he shot Marquez and those bullets match the ones in Barillo, then he’s the second gunman on the grassy knoll.”

Robson put his head in his hands. “If you say so.”

Balrow nodded, pleased with himself. “And he’s the one who has Sands. I’ve got witness reports of a guy fitting Sands’ description driving off with three mariachi and looking pretty fucked up.”

“Why the hell would they want someone from the CIA?”

“He’s CIA, that means he has classified government information, contacts, money, access to guns…three criminals would kill to get their hands on someone like that. That’s why no ransom. They’ll use him for info and then kill him when he’s got nothing left.”

Robson sighed. “Alright. Assuming you’re right. Now what? Containment, elimination, retrieval?”

“We follow our orders. Find Sands, get him out.”

*~*~*~* 

//Is it safe to go in now?// Fideo had slept in his clothes, they were wrinkled and he smelt of drink and sleep and sweat. 

Lorenzo chased the last cornflake around his bowl with the bent metal spoon and shrugged. //Who knows? The noises have stopped so either one of them is dead or they’ve settled it. Since I didn’t hear any shots I’m going to assume it’s the latter.//

He stood and headed across the yard back towards the kitchen. Lorenzo peered inside and sighed with relief. El was stood, leaning against the counter, watching Sands eat an omelet that was smothered in cheese. Something was off though. He sauntered in and set his bowl down on the table, Fideo trailing behind him.

“Still alive then?”

Sands sneered up at him. “Still a fuck-monkey?”

Lorenzo blinked, puzzled. Sands’ lips were swollen and the bottom one was cut, there was a hole in his shirt that hadn’t been there before and he was sitting funny.

Fideo slouched down onto one of the kitchen chairs. “Can I make a request?”

El nodded shortly, then added a curt, //Si// for Sands’ benefit. 

“Not in the kitchen.” Fideo yawned and scratched at his chest.

Sands’ grin was that of genuine delight. “You know Fideo, for a drunken burrito eating jackass, you’re no dumb bunny.”

Lorenzo frowned, confused. “Not in the kitchen, what?” He looked at El and the slow, content half-smile on his face. He looked at Sands and the oddity of his appearance. He put two and two together and four slowly began to form. //Oh Jesus, El…Sands? Of all the people on the planet…//

The grin on Sands’ face vanished in a heartbeat. “Hey, fuck you, stringbean. When I want your opinion on my sex life I’ll fucking well ask for it.” His grip on his cutlery was somewhat threatening, as if he might spring from the chair and attempt to stick his fork through Lorenzo’s jugular.

“Both of you stop.” El didn’t sound the least bit perturbed. “I agree.”

Sands flinched and there was a dangerous trembling to his hands.

“Not in the kitchen,” El said in the same tone he had announced the cleaning rota. The tone that meant there would be no more argument, no further discussion on the matter.

And Sands smirked and relaxed and went back to eating his omelet.

*~*~*~*

Nothing changed. 

Everything changed.

Cheap motels and cheaper bars. Nights working, singing and playing for money for food, and booze, and rent. Saving the coup money for an emergency. Running from the cartels, the occasional shoot out that they would try not to mention to Sands because then he would complain that he didn’t get to join in. The occasional shootout that made Sands grin like death and when the bullets ran out he would use his silver-tipped cane as a weapon as lethal as Carolina’s knives. The routine of bitching over breakfast and siestas where Sands would curl up next to El and El would play his guitar, maybe he would sing, maybe Lorenzo would sing. Some nights were they would all share a bottle of something and talk about things that weren’t important at all.

Nothing changed. Except when Lorenzo would stumble upon El and Sands doing unspeakable things to one another. Sands’ foot under the table in El’s lap at dinner, trying to break the ‘not in the kitchen’ rule. El shoving Sands up against the wall outside a cheap bar. The touches, the way that Sands was now virtually attached to El’s side…

Lorenzo said it made him sick. He was going to throw up on his cornflakes, going to shoot himself to get away, going to join Fideo in the bottom of the bottle to drown them out. God, couldn’t they at least use some discretion? Truth be told, not that he ever would, Lorenzo didn’t actually care if El and Sands were fucking or not, he just enjoyed yanking Sands’ chain. 

He wasn’t as ignorant as Sands liked to say he was; that wouldn’t be humanly possible. Lorenzo suspected vegetables had more intelligence than Sands’ gave him credit for. Either way, he had eyes in his head, unlike some he could name, and he could see the little things that gave away the nature of their relationship.

Sands came into the kitchen and it wasn’t a limp, no, just a slight wince in his walk. It was a slight hesitation when he sat. Not enough to notice unless you were looking for it, and Lorenzo made it his business to look. Sands would hold out his hand, demanding, for Lorenzo to pass him whatever cereal was going that week and there would be bruises or abrasions on his wrists. Sometimes he would have a split lip, or bite marks darkening on his throat, sometimes there would be finger shaped marks on his upper arms or, if his shirt rode up, you could see the same marks on his hips.

He was a sarcastic, foul mouthed little bitch. Half broken and healing in bent and twisted ways. Touchy, possessive of his personal space and god help the fool who tried to take his sunglasses. Wound tight enough to snap, Lorenzo couldn’t recall a day when Sands wasn’t on full alert and you could see it in the way he smoked more, the way his hands trembled, the fact that he should have been gaining weight after his ordeal but the nervous tension burned it away, paring him down.

El seemed to be healing too. That dry humor that Lorenzo had thought gone was slowly returning. He slept in some days, allowing himself to enjoy slow mornings. He walked a little taller, without bravado, just that he held himself a little straighter. 

It was a strange balance between the two. El’s presence leeched some of the tension from Sands. El’s touch could calm him, no matter Sands’ mood. Sands’ snark was what made El smile nowadays. Sands depended on El for sanity and safety and El depended on Sands because the twisted way he was healing molded into all the empty spaces in El’s life.

Lorenzo had caught Sands rubbing at his bruises one day, a pleased, satisfied set to his mouth.

He didn’t understand it, but if it worked for them, then that was alright by him.

Just, sometimes, Lorenzo wished the walls were a little thicker and Sands was a little quieter.


End file.
